I had been away for awhile. And when I returned, I couldn’t remember where I parked. Not was it section A row 11 or section W row 20? But Did I leave it at the airport or was it somewhere else? West side? East side? I couldn’t remember. I felt totally flummoxed and a bit panicked.

I love my car! My car’s name is Jane, and Jane and I have a very good relationship. How could I be such a careless car-mom? Jane… where are you?

I got on the Max (our light rail system) because maybe Jane was at the park-n-ride. I headed west on Max.

Then I had a brilliant idea: I would call #1 Son because he surly knew where Jane was! I felt that I needed to get off the train before calling. I got off at the zoo station.

The zoo Max station is 260 feet underground. It’s the deepest transit station in North America. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that it might not be the best place to get cell phone reception.

Sure enough — no bars.

I needed to surface in order to use my phone. There are elevators for that purpose. I started looking for them. I couldn’t find the freaking elevators anywhere! Where were they? I kept wandering around and around and around. Finally I walked through a large opening and found myself in… a mall.

Wait a minute… a mall? Underground at the zoo station? 260 feet under the ground? A whole mall? A mall that I didn’t know about?

That’s when I woke up enough to realize that Jane was probably in the garage, parked right where I left it. But the dream had been so vivid that I actually got up and looked. It was there. Whew.

Here is the progress on the sea-camo-weedy socks.

Remember how I told you last time, gentle reader, that I had messed up the pattern on the gusset and so I frogged out the whole, entire gusset and started them over again?

In reality, I realized last night that I had messed up the pattern somewhere down by the toe and had been happily following my own version of it ever since.

You can see how the seaweed sort of wobbles in the middle, instead of waving gracefully to and fro like seaweed is wont to do. This seaweed look rather like a large whale came through and thrashed it about.

It’s even more obvious from the wrong side. You can see how the pattern on the right is made up of nice diagonal areas of purls and knits all marching together up the sock, while the pattern of the left is sort of haphazard triangles thrown hither and yon.

We are not amused.

Last night I pondered whether I should rip back to the toe or just go my own way. I decided to leave well enough alone for the following reasons:

Nobody has any business looking at the inside of my sock.

The foot is going to be inside my shoe. See the first point.

I can go back to the right pattern now, at the gussets, and make the leg all OK.

It’s not that obvious unless you look really closely at the sock. See the first point.

Knitting is at its fundamentals, a binary code featuring top-down design, standardized submodules, and recursive logic that relies on ratios, mathematical principles, and an intuitive grasp of three-dimensional geometry.